A group of five women this morning will deliver the last words on the life and death of Ashley Smith.

A group of five women this morning will deliver the last words on the life and death of Ashley Smith.

They are a homemaker, a manager, a public servant, an economist and a bank administrator. But for the last eight months, they’ve taken a leave from their ordinary lives to serve as the jurors in a most extraordinary coroner’s inquest that is estimated to have cost between $2 million to $3 million.

They’ve heard testimony from 80 witnesses, watched excruciating prison videos of the teen inmate being duct-taped and tranquilized by government staff, broken into tears while asking prison officials why staff was so focused on the record-keeping aspect with Ashley, who had grown increasingly prone to harming herself, instead of trying to keep her alive.

Some lawyers at the Grosvenor Street court in Toronto have off-handedly referred to the jurors as Ashley’s “Avenging Angels.”

But Coralee Smith isn’t convinced.

“I really, really don’t think there’s going to be justice for Ashley,” Smith said by phone, her thick Maritime accent cracking slightly. “My gut tells me they’re not coming down with anything other than undecided. I can’t go there and sit and watch people shaking hands and patting each other on the back. I’ve been through that once when they dropped the charges on the guards.”

In determining the cause of Ashley’s death — a verdict they’ve been deliberating for the past two weeks — the jury has five options for how the 19-year-old wound up dead on the floor of her segregation cell at Grand Valley Institution more than six years ago. The potential findings include: suicide, accidental, undetermined, homicide, or death by natural causes.

Smith is praying for homicide, but she doesn’t think it will go that way.

So while lawyers, correctional critics, mental health advocates, rows of reporters and curious members of the public pile into court on Thursday at 11:30 a.m., Smith will be in her home near Halifax, watching the verdict online as the snow, “heavy as lead,” continues to pile on her front drive.

“There will be people saying, ‘Oh, the mother didn’t show,’” Smith said. “It’s not that I don’t care. It’s not that I can’t go. It’s too devastating.”

Ashley Smith died in her cramped segregation cell slumped on the ground turning a deep shade of purple while prison guards — who were under confusing and inappropriate orders from management at Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution for Women to wait and monitor her breathing whenever she habitually tried to self-asphyxiate — hesitated for nearly 20 minutes before responding to her.

(Three guards and their supervisor were later charged with criminal negligence causing death, but the charges were dropped at a preliminary hearing in a Kitchener courtroom, in large part because the Crown and police learned that the guards were following orders when they failed to immediately enter her cell to remove the strip of cloth around her neck).

A spokesperson with Ontario’s office of the chief coroner said Wednesday she doesn’t know of any instances in the province where a jury returned a homicide verdict in a federal prison death that didn’t involve one inmate killing another.

The jurors are also expected to make recommendations intended to prevent a similar death in the future. They may not assign blame or name anyone, including Corrections Canada or its staff, in their verdict.

Lawyers for the Smith family, and advocacy groups including the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, Ontario’s child and youth advocate and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association urged the jury in closing submissions late last month to return a homicide verdict.

A homicide finding would indeed be unusual, and viewed as the jury sending a message to the federal agency responsible for Ashley while she was a prisoner, from late October 2006 until her death on Oct. 19, 2007.

Smith family lawyer Julian Roy told the jury the orders given to Grand Valley guards in the summer and fall of 2007 resulted in those guards not responding in time to Ashley.

But coroner’s counsel and lawyers representing parties at the inquest including federal prison guards, the St. Thomas forensic psychiatric hospital, where Ashley stayed for a week in June 2007, and Correctional Service Canada, urged the jury not to return a homicide verdict.

Corrections lawyer Nancy Noble told the jury that to make a finding of homicide there must be an “action.’’

“Not being creative enough, not being detailed enough, or not utilizing all resources adequately,’’ does not fit the definition of an action, Noble said.

Howard Sapers, the federal correctional investigator who probed Smith’s life behind bars in a damning report titled, “A Preventable Death,” told the Star he has spent the past week re-reading reports on Ashley, “getting all wound up again.

“It’s one of those things that never leaves you.”

Coralee Smith knows.

“Everybody is saying, ‘This is it. This is the end.’ It’s not for us,” Smith said. Ashley’s tragic death and the grim details of her treatment in custody that emerged through the public inquest, has haunted the family. “But I can’t go pointing more fingers. Because this is as far as it’s going to go. Nobody’s going to take any further steps.”

Smith, who has flown into Toronto several times throughout the inquest to give testimony, listen to witnesses and hear closing arguments, said her heart will be in the courtroom tomorrow.

“Ashley will be there. If you get a little chill there, you’ll know it’s her. She’s been there all along.”

Who was Ashley Smith?

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